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Sir Colin Marshall was brought in to head up the change process for BA. Marshall instantly recognized that an attitude shift was critical for the airline. In the '70s and early '80s, BA personnel were renowned for the attitude that they were doing the public a favor by allowing them to fly on their airplanes. They did not hesitate to let the public know this, not only in the content of what they said but also in their tone of voice and body language. Unions also played a big role in dictating BA's bureaucratic culture in those days.
One of the first things Marshall did was to invite in the TMI company of the United Kingdom (a part of the Danish-based training and consulting firm that had helped Jan Carlzon turn Scandinavian Airlines around to profitability) to design a program that would challenge all 36,500 BA staff to take a totally fresh look at their attitudes and approaches to customers and to each other. The program was titled "Putting People First" and was the central feature in a company-wide change process.
Over the next 18 months, BA employees from around the entire world attended the two-day "Putting People First" program. Sir Colin Marshall personally introduced over 60 percent of these programs, sometimes flying between the United States and England on a Concorde to say a few words to the participants.
Since 1983 when that initial training took place, BA has followed up with other internal programs, such as "To Be the Best", "Winning of Customers", and "A Day in the Life", designed to educate all departments about the work of the rest of the company and to reinforce the message of superior customer service. Today BA is considered an example of a leading-edge service company, frequently courted by others for advice--a far cry from its previous reputation.
After focusing on attitudes, BA began to look specifically at the role of complaints in retaining long-term customers. First, Marshall installed video booths at Heathrow so that upset customers could go immediately to a video booth and sound off to Marshall himself.
Then, to the tune of $6.7 million, BA introduced a computer system to help analyze customer preferences with the aim of keeping customers for life. The system is affectionately called "Caress". BA says, "We used to try to ignore complaints. We tried to make it difficult for the complaint by insisting telephone callers write in, and by adhering strictly to a rule book that allowed us to tell customers that they were at fault by breaking a BA regulation which they weren't even aware of."
Based on its own customer research, BA says that 67 percent of their complaining passengers will fly with the airline again if their complaints are handled well. Considering that an average business class passenger is worth approximately $150,000 over a lifetime of flying, anything that expedites customer complaints is a good investment. Before "Caress", BA literally had mountains of complaint-related papers. Now they are quickly scanned into the computer, along with any relevant travel documents: tickets, baggage receipts, and boarding passes. "Caress" automatically puts the complaint into a queue based on travel class, threat of legal action or VIP status.
"Caress" makes suggestions as to appropriate compensation for each category of complaints, but customer relations executives can override the system if they feel something different is warranted. It used to take BA about a month to respond to complaints. Now, 80 percent of the time, BA handles complaints in only three days! BA customer surveys show an increase in satisfaction from 40 percent to 65 percent. And while satisfaction has increased, compensation given to upset passengers has actually decreased.
"Caress" is also able to categorize the common complaints BA receives. Over half of them deal with seat allocation, food quality, denial of boarding, smoking/nonsmoking conflicts, seat comfort, ticketing, delays, baggage handling, disruption of service, ticketing, and check-in services. Now BA is attempting to proactively address these aspects of its service.
BA likes its "Caress" system so much that, as a pilot test, it is installing terminals in six of its large corporate customers' business sites so business travelers can complain directly to BA when they get back to their offices. In addition to "Caress", BA has initiated a series of other customer-feedback strategies, including asking customers how they are doing as often as possible. Today, the airline is one of the most successful and profitable in the world because they recognize customer complaints as a valuable source of business information.
Discussion Questions
* How does your company view customer complaints? How do you talk about complaining customers?
* Do staff members see complaints as an opportunity to satisfy dissatisfied customers?
* Do staff members tend to blame policies when they cannot meet customer needs?
* What specific lessons have you learned from your complaining customers?
* What specific strategies does your company have in place to encourage and then learn from complaints?
 Chapter2
The Biggest Bargain In Market Research
"It is easy enough to drive customers away. There are many means to this end, and some companies have tried them all. Two of the most common methods are to ignore complaints or handle complaints poorly. Yet well-handled complaints can create strong bonds between customers and organizations."
"You have to get your stuff out of this room immediately," the hotel staff shouted at us. At the conclusion of a particularly energetic TMI seminar in San Francisco, we were ready to say good-bye to our participants and handle last-minute questions and product sales. The hotel staff thought otherwise. They had another function in the same room that evening and were determined we would be out by 5:30 PM sharp.
Without asking our permission, the staff gathered up our supplies and unceremoniously dumped them into the hallway. We lost sales, created a bad impression with our customers, and were left feeling angry and frustrated with a hotel that had, until this incident, given us two days of superb service.
We complained loudly at the time. No doubt we were seen as "difficult" customers by the hotel staff, but our needs were not being met. The following day, TMI's logistics director wrote the hotel's general manager a blistering letter, describing what had happened and saying we would "never again" return to that hotel for our seminars.
Two days later a huge bouquet of roses appeared at the TMI office for our logistics director. She was teased about some secret admirer who must have been desperate to spend such a sum of money on flowers. She said it was the biggest bouquet she had ever received. When she opened the accompanying card, it had the name of the hotel's general manager. A short while later, he called, apologized for the terrible treatment we had received, and told us he definitely did not want to lose our firm's business. He promised the next time TMI held a seminar at the hotel, the rooms would be given free of charge. He also wrote a follow-up letter confirming his verbal agreement and guaranteed us that the hotel would discontinue its practice of booking events too closely together.
On several occasions, various TMI staff have suggested we try other hotels for our seminars, but our logistics director has stood steadfastly behind using this particular hotel that treated us so poorly--and then recovered so magnificently. She became a champion of this hotel.
Because seminars are complex products, the hotels that TMI uses for its functions, by necessity, become partners in the success of our events. We essentially move in for two days and have hundreds of interactions with dozens of hotel staff. The chance for something to go amiss is very high. We have had other problems with this hotel since our harsh dismissal, but each time, the staff has been superb in resolving each mishap--even when it was our fault! The manager of that particular hotel has learned that complaining customers who are well treated can become marketplace allies helping to identify internal practices that create problems for customers.
Complaints Define What Customers Want
Customer complaints tell organizations how to improve services and products--and thereby help to maintain market share. As IBM representative John Davis says, "The selling edge trick is to establish a continuously flowing pipeline from the customer's mind to the salesperson's ear. When you keep track of what customers want and do not want, what pleases and gripes them, you can adjust your sights accordingly and stay a step ahead of competitors" John McKitterick of General Electric goes even further to say that: "...the principal task of the marketing function ... is not so much to be skillful in making the customer do what suits the interest of the business, as to be skillful in conceiving and then making the business do what suits the interests of the customer"
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